I'm trying to film a short motion sequence out of sketchup for a tutorial I'm preparing. When I click record in camtasia, I am getting a black screen where sketchup just was. Also, in my Windows Task Manager, it shows Sketchup going back and forth between "not responding" and active.

Let's just try a restart.

Not helpful.

What about if I uncheck the "turn off display acceleration" at the end of the recording setup dialog?

Edit all pix to the ratio you'll be recording in. otherwise you won't fill the whole screen (portrait-orientation pix are bad about this. You might favor landscape-style when you are picking pix.)One way to fill the dead (visual) space is to have the main points appear as text/bullets (powerpoint style)

800 by 600 is the largest you would want to go for this. That's a 4:3 ratio, which is not as modern-feeling as a 3:2.

Aim to be able to do at least a 90 second video with no post-production needed.

don't doodle with the mouse.

plan your sequences/statements in short chunks and use the pause button.

Look for ways to cut dead space. Sometimes an 8min video can be cut down to 5min.

As you proof-watch the video, look for any confidential info onscreen that should be fuzzed out. I've already learned a lot by seeing the toolbars and Firefox add-ins on other's screencasts.

Camtasia - $300, records to anything but most notably to Flash/swf/flv, includes Flash player which can be embedded in a website,

Captivate - $600 alone or more as part of Adobe Premier Pro, said to be a memory hog, very "cool" output Flash player (embeddable of course), integrates well with all the other Adobe products for a very smooth experience (efficiency)

Other tools...

Snapz Pro - inexpensive tool for native video capture on a Mac.

Summary:

For me, WME is out because I need to be able to produce "smart" (interactive) video.

If I was going to be using a high-powered computer, it would probably tilt toward Captivate, but since I need something light on memory, I'm leaning in favor of Camtasia, which is a very nice piece of software compared to everything else.

Here's another big "problem" with Captivate. Adobe is very clever, and they've structured their prices so that you are strongly encouraged to buy Captivate, for example, as part of one of their packages which can be purchased at discount in a mega-package ... you get the idea.

Last year I bought a $100 flash-building tool which was terribly inefficient and ultimately I couldn't get motivated to produce anything.

I'm going with Camtasia for now. Leave me a comment if you'd like an update on my experience. I usually respond within 24 hours.

This rules out the possibility that the problem is WordPress, kimili, the embedding code behind kimili, or the way I'm entering the code into my wordpress entry.

The problem can be only one of two things:

Either something is different about the camtasia output since Brooks put up those videos, or

Something is different about the way he modified the files. At the techsmith forum, he says that the .swf address in the config may need to be made absolute, but in his video from early 2006, he doesn't mention this. Perhaps there is something else he

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I'm sorry you are having issues with getting this to work. However, what they are referring to in that forum thread are third party applications that we do not work with. Also, the forums are User-to-User forums, and Brooks is only trying to help since he's familiar with the third party app. What I would recommend is that you create an account with our forums and submitt your question/issue there since you are inquiring about something that's completely out of our Free Technical Support.